Thursday, March 16, 2006

I live by two words: "Fuck you! Pay me!"

Hmm. Is there a story here?

My regular cab driver is named Bill. I always call him when I need a lift because he knows the fastest way to get anywhere and he's always good company. He came to San Francisco from China about thirty years ago, and he told me the other day that when he graduated from Galileo High School, he got a job as a bellhop.

On the exact same ocean liner that brought him to the United States.

...hmm. Something about that just seems really cool to me. Maybe it's the context I have of knowing the guy... maybe it's just kind of a loaded idea.

... and yes Mister Maher, California does indeed look like it's going to have an excellent showing this year!

My luck, though, it'll go to one of those asswipes from Los Angeles.

*****

Hmm. Listening now to the first Kanye West album, The College Dropout. Finally got convinced to pick it up by his performance of "Two Words" with Mos Def on the Chapelle Show. I'm liking it. Nice underground hip hop vibe with catchier beats and a slightly more mainstream style of rhyming...

*****

Heh, I was so busy posting this week I forgot to talk about the June solicits from Marvel, DC and Image.

The book I'm most excited about is, well, Lucifer #75. This has been among my two or three favorite books for years now, and seeing the series come to and end is kind of an emotional experience. Other epics I've followed - Preacher, Planetary, Stray Bullets, and so on - I've picked up when they were all in trades or at least a few years into their publication. But I've been reading Lucifer since issue #14, which my buddy Frank at Danger Room Comics in Olympia gave to me for free. "I think you might dig this," he said with a smile, a smile that got wider and wider over the following months as I got more and more enthusiastic about the book's development. I was hooked from that first dose, but the series developed into something far more accomplished and significant than I'd have predicted. This is the latest of the true Vertigo classics, a small handful of landmark comics, and I'm more excited than I can even say to see how it'll all come down.